


the waters dark and deep

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Farmer Geralt, M/M, Mind the warnings, excessive descriptions of agriculture, they go to the coast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:34:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22256533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Yennefer wonders if the Witcher bent first to will the ground warm and dry or if he hacked with furious, shuddering blows until the earth fractured and gave way to him. No matter, the grave carved out of the swell of the bluff bears the same dark weight in the end. A little body, withered in age, wrapped in a worn quilt from their bed and swept beneath the soil one broad stroke at a time.Or, the one where Geralt goes with Jaskier to the coast and spends happily ever after farming by the sea.Edit: third chapter added
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 68
Kudos: 506





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> me: *sits down to write a romantic little ditty about two assholes running away to the coast together*
> 
> also me: *trips and falls down a cliff and bangs out 1k completely unintelligible awful tragic sad bullshit about fragile memory and inevitable death in just under an hour* oh fuk i can't believe i've done this

The most well-worn and best-loved tavern songs have many varied verses and versions, being twisted and re-composed by each bard who puts them to memory. And so, laid out here is just one thread that splits, one of the tales that is coaxed out decades and decades on, when the fire pit has burned low, when a hush has fallen over the audience in the shadowed hall and the singer begins a warbling, sad melody that coalesces in the hollow air of the rafters. 

Here it is, just one iteration of events, a single song of many songs, one story to live on through the ages: 

Together, they go to the coast.

*

In the twilight, the pair arrive at the edge of the sea, where rambling crags of porous rock teem sharply down cliff-faces or sprawl in miles of treacherous ground, the tide leaving sucking pockets and crevices of seawater to shine like glinting eyes in the last, fading light. Roiling contusions of clouds flit with lightning along the dimming horizon and great, pattering snowflakes begin to fall, sticking to their hair and quivering on the mare's back and slicking the path among the rocks.

Not to be dissuaded by foul weather or thwarted expectations, the bard swings his arms wide as he clambers up a choice boulder and whoops with gusto into the thickening, crepuscular fog. The Witcher cuffs him before he can belt into song and further alert every nocturnal beast of land and sea that there is fresh blood ripe to be spilled.

 _Here we are,_ he wants to bellow into the mists, raise triumphant notes into the returning tide. He imagines the very atmosphere could swell with his vibrato and the clouds burst apart, the heavens allowing one last gleam of crimson sunlight to touch on the pair of them standing here together. _Here we are! Here we are!_

Instead, the wind sweeps up off the sea and the fat, wet snowflakes blur into a whitening curtain at the edge of a blizzard, and they pick back along the craggy beach to a musty cave fractured into the base of the cliff, its previous occupant picked to yellowed bones. 

The grumbling warnings to keep his voice down do not dissuade the bard from composing a few, lilting stanzas before the meager fire, the sound both muffled by the rising whistle of the blizzard and thrumming hauntingly back around them in the damp echo of the cave. None of the lyrics stick in their memory, fumbling and incoherent, but imagery remains.

Here we are. Here we are. Here we are together.

At the border of the coast and the cusp of something else, the opening, tremulous note of a song that will outlast them.

*

“Was it worth it?” sighs the sorceress, half-stolen by the wind that flattens the knee-length grass along the bluff. She is a dark blot behind him as he watches the colorless sea far below crest and froth with whitecaps. A strange echo of another conversation a lifetime ago. 

No exaggeration there. It has been fifty years or more since he sought a dragon in the hills and thwarted the tendrils of Fate. 

No, not thwarted. The twining, reaching fingers had ceaselessly tested the door he closed to them until they found cracks to slither in. 

The naked, wind-battered trees and last dregs of crops wilting to grey rags in the bare furrows of earth alongside the ramshackle cabin mark the advanced chill of the season. No ordinary spade was likely to break the frosted ground, and yet, an overturned mound of earth lies before a stacked cairn. Two steps from the lip of the cliff face, the scant pile of stones, not yet grown up with lichen, seems to hover on the steady line of the horizon, caught between grey, quavering sea and grey, endless sky. 

Yennefer wonders if the Witcher bent first to will the ground warm and dry or if he hacked with furious, shuddering blows until the earth fractured and gave way to him. No matter, the grave carved out of the swell of the bluff bears the same dark weight in the end. A little body, withered in age, wrapped in a worn quilt from their bed and swept beneath the soil one broad stroke at a time.

His faded human bard, no melodies left.

“Was it worth it?” she asks again, sees his broad shoulders round down in grief.

“I knew it would come,” he says. “Inevitable as anything.”

“And still?”

He speaks careful and slow the way he always has when words come, each syllable weighty and ragged, held one by one in the air as though he has spent a long time considering them and in speaking them marks them as dearest sentiment, no room for their truth to be questioned. 

“There will never be a creature more wonderful, more beautiful. Not in any age. Not to the end of every age.”

“Words worthy of his songs.”

“All throughout the Continent. There are men who know my name by the tales he spun,” he says. “But what of him? They know of the bard but do they know that he was--”

His songs swell eternal over peak and valley and weathered bluff, recorded and analyzed in bardic colleges and scrawled down in annals and tomes to be retained for eons to come and yet, what history book will remember these fifty years spent on this simple farmstead nestled on the coast? What glorious tales could be told of the meager crops and the lambings and the bitter-cold nights beat back by huddling before banked fires? 

“They won't remember,” he says, and it is a pain as sharp as though he has been swept over the steep bank into the tumultuous sea. _I won't remember,_ is the unspoken fear, for already the earliest decades have dimmed away from him, viewed like the dying flicker of a campfire held on the other rim of a mountain while he stands a valley away.

“Then, don't let them forget,” she says, but he is no poet. He has no head for lyric or meter, and the words blunder away from him, a frustrating, desperate jumble of sweet memory and image, nothing to easily press down like a meadow flower into the pages of a book and preserve.

He tears the ugly scraps loose from their bindings each time he tries, casting them out to be lost to the rise of the unforgiving sea.

As Jaskier has been. As the cliffside itself eventually is, bluster and gale eroding steadfast rock to a spill of loose stones devoured by waves. The little cabin first rotting and then weathering and then slipping into the surf.

A reverberation of one brief and joyful composition, some glimpse of the melody retained only in the rhythm of the tides, unheard unless one happened to stop on a certain bluff in just the correct spot on a clear night cut with stars and paused to hear the rustle among the buffeted grass.

_Here we were. Here we were._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just wanted to write farmer!geralt and jaskier live in a little cottage by the sea (and i still may frankly)
> 
> title from [this lullaby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcnd55tLCv8) by billy joel which i recommend not singing to any offspring you may have unless you want to foster really angsty little bastards (like me). alternatively, peter hollen's [acapella version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_UML28Dwg)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: *has a long list of happy, quirky goofy shit i want to write about farmer!geralt and jaskier hanging out in a cottage by the sea for a whole lifetime*
> 
> me: *faceplants into this soppy atrocious tragic wordy mess*
> 
> haha whoopsie! sorry!

That morning when they emerge form the dark slash of the cave, the sheet of snow that lies across the world, cut with grey slush where the high tide laps among the stony shore, nearly obscures the overturned trundle cart on the narrow goats-path they set out to trudge along. Huddled behind the cart is a man whose wet clothing has frozen to the sod, drifts of snow dusting his head and shoulders. A wet, crimson tear splits across his chest, deep enough that the air wheezes through his ribs from a shredded lung.

“Which way,” asks the Witcher, and the man, blue-lipped but oddly stoic for one in such a state, tells the tale of the creature with its talons and wings and feral teeth that had toppled his cart and stolen the fresh string of fish he was taking up to his cottage for dinner and swept up along the path to a wind-swept bluff where it would have found his wife out taking the washing off the line and his children playing in the fine-packed dirt hollow between the house and the sheep barn and would the good Witcher see to it they were safe? Or if not safe, then burned on the pyre? For he was the last of his kin in these parts and no one to bury them and no one wanting to take over the little farm either, for the soil was poor and the winters long and harsh and the sea giving up nothing but scrawny, oily fish and always the monsters coming up out of the moors.

The Witcher listens close as the man wheezes through his story, and when it is finished, he slips a dagger up into the man's throat as though gutting a fish behind the gills and strangled gouts of blood steam up as they meets snow and then, the man is still. 

Jaskier cries out at the sight, the quality of the crisp air such that he can smell the blood, almost feel the heat from it, and Geralt gives him a dark look over the corpse. His gloved hands thumb closed the blank eyes.

“Come on,” he grunts, taking up the red mare's reins again. “There could be someone still alive up there.”

There isn't. The creature shrieks at them as the path crests over a low rise, claws scrabbling for purchase on the thatch roof of a little cabin at the center of the snow-laden field. It holds some small grisly thing in its forefeet, two similar mounds lying between the cottage and the sheep barn. A woman curled dead along the front path, stretched as though reaching for her children.

Jaskier hangs back with the horse as the Witcher launches himself down the slope to engage his quarry. He tries not to look too closely at the ragdoll figure that shakes in the creature's hands.

It's over quick, with a spray of obsidian liquid on white snow and a pitiful warbling as the creature shrinks in on itself to die.

The Witcher builds two pyres at the edge of the cliff; one for the monster and one for the woman and the three dark shapes in the snow. He will return for the body of the man on the pass in the morning. Before the pyres, the bard thinks darkly about his elation the day before. How at likely the same time as he had brimmed with delighted song in a firelit cave, these people had died horribly. 

It is a two-sided thing, to travel with a Witcher. There is this brutality, this tragedy, dark and shocking as blood hissing against snow. But there is also the joy that could bluster a thousand songs in his chest, the small moments where he sees this great man lying a stranger's family to rest, brushing a little girl's dark hair out of her face, arranging her brothers' limbs across the stacked logs dragged from alongside the barn.

The brutality is there in the world whether he follows the Witcher or not, but the chance to glimpse those kindnesses lies with him alone.

“We could stay here a while,” says Geralt, flickering with light from the pyres. “Mind the farm.”

“Alright,” says Jaskier, the implication nearly stealing his breath. “Got a nice view from up here at least. Must be unreal in spring.” 

“Yeah,” says Geralt, the unspoken _maybe we'll stick around long enough to find out_ hanging loud in the snowy clearing under the grey, afternoon sky.

And so, they stay there a while, and then a little bit longer.

* * *

It is a cool, clear morning, the kind where one can see for miles out to sea from the cabin porch, when Geralt wakes to find that Jaskier has passed on in their sleep. His fingernails are blue half-moons resting on the patchwork quilt. The fire has died to embers, and the air is hushed. No wind groaning along the thatch roof. Jaskier's greyed length of hair spread out on the pillow. Geralt touches it.

He has mourned so long and so hard that when it has finally come he finds that he feels only numbness.

He has already grieved for years, for decades, each laugh and smile and quip as though it was the last. His smile last night had been thin and weak, and bent low at his bed side, Geralt had sung to him, as he so rarely did. An old song oft used as a lullaby but gone long out of favor. 

He had expected Jaskier to scoff, call him on his cliché, lecture that his last earthly song should be a sweeter tune, not that tired nursery rhyme.

The old man neither scoffed nor lectured, his breaths whistling from his cracked lips that twitched into a last show of pleasure. _Oh, how his grin had once dazzled. How he had smiled._

In the morning, Geralt leaves the body in bed and goes to the barn, where there is only the warm scent of hay and quiet rustling of the sheep and the horses. He touches the neck of the young brown mare he has again called Roach, maybe one of a score now who has shared the name. Her cinnamon muzzle wuffles against his palm, whiskers seeking the cubes of sugar he often keeps in his pockets for her, a habit he had picked up from the bard long ago. Jaskier's piebald gelding in the stall beside her nickers low in a bid for a sweet as well.

He dumps grain for the horses and then puts them to pasture, stoops to check that the ewe who lambed two nights back still has good milk for her bumbling offspring and then turns the sheep out as well. The winter has been dry and cold this year so far with the fields not yet a sucking pit of mud and the forage still green enough for the livestock to graze. Soon, he will have to close the gates to the bottom field to keep them out of the muck. 

He bangs the barn dirt off his boots before he goes back into the house. He sits on the edge of the bed where the old man is a still form beneath the quilt. It is only the last few months when the sickness came that he truly showed his age. Even weathered and creaking as he walked, he had a flounce in his step, a trill in his voice. That towards the end, Geralt mostly minded the farm alone was no matter; the bard had never been much help even as a younger man.

He turns a cold hand over in his own, feels the stiffness of the body already beginning to seep in. He can only hope, as he has achingly hoped for years, that this small life here was enough for Jaskier, as it had been enough for him in the half a century since they first came to the coast. He can only press a last kiss to the withered knuckles and then go out to the barn again to fetch the shovel.

Jaskier is only two days in the ground when Yennefer arrives, a solemn figure dressed in iridescent feathers.

In the spring, he sells the flock in the market and the piebald gelding too but does not offer up the old farmstead. No one would want it anyway. The soil is poor and the winters long and the sea giving up very little and the monsters will likely return with no Witcher to threaten them off. He rides off on the brown mare and allows it to sit vacant and gather dust and fall slowly in on itself. Nothing left there except memories, and in time, not even that.


	3. Chapter 3

_WINTER_

The farmstead spreads across acres of rolling pasture crossed with stone fences, the cabin and outbuildings, built of the same moss-dampened stone, sitting low in a depression to protect from the battering wind off the sea. The sheer bluff to the Southwest cuts sharply down to the Gulf of Praxeda, frothing waves a constant roar as they charge up the base of the cliff and suck back down again. To the North, an imposing range of mountains often obscured in clouds. To the West and down a long but well-worn path through the hills, a small village tucked into a cove, a supply post for a nearby salt mine.

There is the simple cabin, dirt floors and thatch roof and rough-sawn wood furniture, the whole living space contained to one room centered around an imposing stone hearth.

There is the sheep barn a few steps away, smelling of musty hay and manure. Beyond that, there is the silage storage and drying shed and outhouse and farther on, the springhouse, where cool, clear water runs into a stone trough. Along the pastures, sprawls an orchard full of gnarled trees and several strips of cultivated fields for growing root vegetables, cabbages, potatoes, squash, lying bare this deep in winter.

It is with meticulous consideration that Geralt commits these details to memory, walking each rise and furrow.

“Do you know anything about farming?” asks Jaskier, boisterously tagging along.

“No,” says Geralt, cresting a hill to peer down into the next pasture.

“Right,” says Jaskier as he scrabbles up after him. “How hard can it be?”

The dead farmer kept detailed records, and the cellar and silo are well-stocked for now. There is not much to do but keep warm until the weather turns.

The flock of sheep numbers ten ewes and a few ewe-lambs kept from the previous spring, plus a lone ram in his own paddock. Geralt stands to watch them nibble at fodder in the winter silence of the barn, arms folded across his chest.

“I think you should stare at them a bit more intensely. Might finally threaten them into giving up their tantilizing, ovine secrets,” says Jaskier.

“Hmm,” Geralt grunts.

“Shall I write about this, then? The Great Wolf flummoxed by sheep.”

To Geralt's chagrin, he spends the rest of the season doing so, plucking out notes as they huddle close to the blazing hearth, crooning lyrics from the barn loft as he watches Geralt do the morning work of shoveling manure and spreading silage and building a stall for Roach to keep the ewe-lambs from pestering her, the mare eyeing the woolen creatures with snorting disdain.

_“The Witcher was well-used to bloodshed and beatings  
but floundered and faltered when faced with lambs bleating~”_

That Jaskier lounges in the cobwebbed loft is as much to avoid Geralt's ire as for his claim that it has better acoustics.

The winter is enduring and quiet, with no visitors, and a chill wind howls over the farmstead night and day, whistling along the thatched roof and rattling the window panes. They eat pickled turnips and brined cabbage and lamb jerky from the stores in the cellar. Some days, the sun seems not to rise at all and the snow piles deep and then melts to churned mud that freezes in ruts again. Some nights, feral screechings are carried on the wind from a fair distance away, but no monsters dare come near.

It is practicality that drives them to begin to share the cabin's single bed. No sense in Geralt curled in a bedroll on the ground while Jaskier shivers beneath the blankets. The straw mattress is scratchy and narrow, but they curl back to back with the quilt pulled up to their chins and Jaskier finds it to be the most comfortable he has been in a long time. It is in these moments that they share hushed conversations, the pull of sleep softening the tongue.

“Would you have gone with her instead?” Jaskier asks, voice held just above a whisper. “If she asked?”

“She wouldn't have asked,” says Geralt. His broad back presses in a firm line against Jaskier's body. Curled this way, Jaskier cannot guess at his expression even if he lifts his head and twists back to look.

“But you had to have wanted to.”

“It doesn't matter,” he grunts.

On the barren cliffside that day after the dragon hunt, Jaskier had witnessed the violent argument with Yennefer but not heard the words. When it ended and the witch whisked herself away in a crackle of static, Geralt rounded on him, furious, a finger pointed in harsh accusation, but his open mouth had twisted closed into a grimace instead of unleashing whatever he intended to say.

They stood a long while on the exposed round of the mountain, Geralt watching the little party of dragon hunters begin to pick back down the winding pass together, Jaskier watching Geralt's face.

“Let's go,” the Witcher said at last.

“Go where exactly?”

“Might have to stop for provisions. With good weather, it could take three, four days.”

“What might?” The Witcher was already moving off to shoulder his pack and start down the mountain. The bard hastened to follow. “Geralt, where are we going?”

“Like you said.” Geralt had looked at Jaskier, then, his mouth a firm line, eyes a glint of gold giving nothing away. “To the coast.”

Some nights in the shared bed, the dying fire sinking to a deepening chill, the Witcher turns and allows their bodies to settle closer together, quieting Jaskier's fitful shivering.

In the long years after, when he recalls that first winter, it is those moments that encapsulate it. A pocket of warmth beneath the quilt and coals glowing in the hearth. Geralt's breath fluttering along the hairs at the base of his neck. The crash of the waves below the bluff beating out a rhythmic lullaby that coaxes him down into sleep.

* * *

_SPRING_

The first lambs come before the weather has broken, a roaring gale that batters the coast turning to an ice storm overnight. Every path and trail becomes a sheet of glass. Dripping icicles cling to the thatch roof and the trees in the orchard and the ram's grey wool.

Geralt crouches in the barn by flickering lamplight, Jaskier sitting cross-legged in the straw with two still-wet lambs held in his lap, their mother straining with the third.

“Easy there,” says the Witcher bent over the ewe and with one steady hand guides the last lamb free. Jaskier finds that the silly ballad he spent so long composing no longer seems as clever. Forget the thrall of the laughing crowd; this is far more poignant. About the tender gesture in sweeping the afterbirth from the lamb's face, about the gentle nudge of the trembling thing to its mother's tongue, he could write unending lines of poetry.

As the ice melts and the wet air goes warm with the thaw, the ewes and their wobbly, new lambs go out to graze on the flush of spring grass. At first, a few, wavering wildflowers appear nodding in the wind, and then, suddenly, the fields ripple with them. The trees in the orchard set bloom, and bees bumble among them. A pond in the front pasture, nothing but a frozen pit of mud through the winter, suddenly swarms with dragonflies and singing frogs.

Jaskier hardly pauses in his hasty scrawl to capture it all in poetic verse, hauling around a notebook and pen as he follows Geralt in his daily chores.

The sheep come in each night to bed down in the safety and relative warmth of the barn, so Geralt starts his mornings there. Talking to Roach in hushed tones as the mare finishes her breakfast of oats from their grain stores and checking that the lambs have done well through the night.

As the rising sun catches in a stream of gold through his hair, Geralt drags wooden gates to let the sheep out to their field and Roach out to hers, then goes to traipse along the perimeter of the fenceline to check for downed limbs or loosened stones or predator tracks pressed into the mud.

Jaskier follows.

His voice often hangs in clear notes in the morning air, new songs that speak of rolling hills and tender blossoms and the sea. He does not sing about the sore feeling that rises in swells through his stomach when Geralt turns back to see that he is keeping up.

Their winter provisions dwindling, it becomes necessary to go down the winding path to the nearby village. The village is salt-slick and haphazard, a bevy of small boats bobbing along a warped pier in the cove and cobblestone streets lined with dour houses and ragged market stalls. Despite attempts to be discreet, Geralt's hood pulled low over his face and Jaskier dressed in muted colors, hushed gossip follows them through the grey streets of the town.

“You're the Witcher what stole the Garric farm,” says a pig-eyed vendor when Jaskier steps to inspect his wares.

“No, no,” says Jaskier. “Not stolen. We're minding it.”

“Mindin' yer tongue is what ye should be doin', boy.”

“It's good coin,” says the Witcher, spilling his purse. “Take it and give us what we need or we'll go elsewhere.” The vendor eyes him bitterly but takes the coin.

“He was a good man and an honest one what ran that farmstead,” says the vendor. “Tell me the lot met a brave end at least.”

“Brave to the last,” Geralt says, and the vendor nods, slips them what they ask for. With no further incidents, they leave town laden with fresh supplies, Roach's saddlebags bulging as Geralt leads her along the trail through the hills.

“Geralt,” Jaskier says as they walk. “How long do you plan on staying here? Minding the farm?” He doesn't say we. He doesn't know why he's bringing this up now, just that spring has gone on dreamily with no signs that the Witcher is looking to move on. One of the bags strapped to Roach's back is full of crop seeds to last a whole growing season.

“Don't know,” says Geralt.

“Because, listen, I'll be honest, I'm still not sure why we're here in the first place.” Geralt looks back at him.

“It was your suggestion.”

“I'd figured a holiday or something. A bit of rest,” says Jaskier. More likely, some other grand adventure fighting with sea monsters or the like.

“Maybe I'm not rested yet,” says Geralt. “If you're bored, you can always find someone else to sing about.”

“I'm not bored,” he says, perhaps too quickly. “I've still got to write about all your clumsy attempts at sowing vegetables.”

The rest of the trek back to the farmstead, he spends composing new verses, easily dancing out of the way of Geralt's swats when the bard happens on a particularly ridiculous turn of phrase.

_“He was good-acquainted with battle most savage  
but met sore defeating from turnips and cabbage~”_

The weather grows warm enough to sit out on the porch of the cabin in the evenings watching the sun hover crimson over the edge of the water while they pass a dusty bottle of spirits back and forth. Geralt leans on his elbows, shirt sleeves rucked up, streaked in mud from the daily work. His eyes are closed, head tipped back.

Jaskier's chest hurts to look at him in the glow from the fading light.

Despite the mild nights, neither resumes sleeping on the floor. Jaskier wakes often in the night with his nose buried in Geralt's chest, arms enclosing him, legs pressed between one another. He is loathe to make any movement to disturb the embrace, holding perfectly still until sleep claims him again.

One morning, Geralt stirs and mumbles something into Jaskier's hair as they lie curled together, close enough that his lips brush along the crown of his head like a kiss, and the seize of his heart is so immediate and immense, he fears he may expire there at once.

Geralt rises from bed, seeming not to notice the swell of Jaskier's breath, and goes to the barn to start the day anew.

* * *

_SUMMER_

Summer comes blazing over the hills in wet flickers of humid air that rise from the swaying pastures. Though the heat does not match the sweltering intensity found farther South, it still slicks Jaskier's lengthening hair to his forehead and the back of his neck and leaves him shucked to his underclothes some days, lying out on the cabin porch groaning.

Geralt seems not to mind, going about his work as usual. The crops are growing up lush and bushy, but the rows need frequent weeding to keep them tidy. The Witcher kneels to the earth, pressing his fingers into loam and feeling out stray unwanted taproots and tendrils, while Jaskier hides in the shade of the orchard, strumming chords beneath rustling apple trees.

The lambs have grown big and precocious and stay out all night on the lush, green pastureland. Their wooly mothers require shearing as the heat intensifies, Geralt bent swearing in the pasture to make careful passes with the iron shears over the wool of each pinned sheep. Roach is equally fat and happy and spends long days kicking up her heels and indulging in luxurious rolls among the ample grass.

It's Jaskier who first suggests a dip in the ocean, but when they head down together to the stone beach, a packed lunch under Jaskier's arm, he finds the water far too frigid.

“I thought you were hot,” says Geralt and picks a choice rock to swan-dive off into the surf. In typical Witcher fashion, he seems not to notice the ice-cold water, grinning at Jaskier while he floats on his back.

“I'm hot, not suicidal,” Jaskier says, toes curled around the edge of a rock. “I'd freeze my tits off in half a second out there.”

“My tits seem fine,” says Geralt and swims out farther into the Gulf.

“Right,” says Jaskier.

Though there is no genuine beach or flat area anywhere along the coast, Jaskier manages to find a suitable boulder to perch on. The rocks are rough and porous, pock-marked with barnacles and clusters of sea snails, and the waves against them send frothy spray into the blue sky, shimmering with prisms of light under the noonday sun. Geralt sluices through the water with ease, arms cutting up behind him in sharp strokes.

“See, this is what I imagined,” Jaskier says as Geralt finally surfaces from the water and settles beside him. “A nice, restful holiday on the coast. Just salty air and warm days and crashing surf.” He sighs wistfully. “I don't know why you bother with that weeding stuff. Looks dreadful.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” says Geralt and leans to fish a hard rind of cheese from their pack. He is still damp from the sea, strands of grey hair allowing rivulets of water to run down the sculpted plane of his back.

“I'm not likely to write a well-loved ballad about Geralt of Rivia vanquishing weeds in the garden.” But then, for the rest of the afternoon, he does just that.

_“He had no great trouble with werewolves and banshees_  
_but faced endless struggle with thistles and bindweed~”_

The pair lazes on the coastline half the day, eating fresh wild berries and cheese and dry, dark bread from the pack and chasing off iridescent seabirds that squawk after their morsels.

When they head back up the path along the bluff for the evening chores, the orange sky dripping like yolk over the rippling water, Jaskier's skin is ruddy-pink from the sun. For all the paleness of his skin, Geralt, infuriatingly, suffers no discomfort, a fact that Jaskier curses vocally for days after as he writhes in blistering misery on their shared bed.

“Do you ever stop making noise?” asks Geralt, even as he gives into Jaskier's melodramatic moaning and helps to slather a soothing cream onto his crimson shoulders.

The places where the Witcher's hands touch seem to burn hotter still.

There are long, mellow days with work through the mornings and languid swims in the ocean through the evenings. There are nights too warm for sleeping indoors, the pair of them bedding down in the fields. For old time's sake.

One night, sprawled in the rippling pasture to watch the moon crest the mountains in a froth of stars, Geralt rolls over and kisses him, simple as anything.

The earth is still sun-warmed beneath them, and the long grass stirs around their joined bodies, a breeze off the sea brushing silver hair in a curtain to cover his face. The proximity is suffocating, though Geralt is careful to keep his weight from settling on him, holding just close enough to feel the slow, thrumming heartbeat in his chest.

“Oh,” he says as the Witcher pulls back. Jaskier chases his cheek as he draws away with the disbelieving touch of gentle fingertips. “Are we doing this, then?”

“Shut up,” Geralt grunts and leans just so into the touch, his eyes drifting shut. As though he expects in the next moment to be chastised, spurned, but has taken this liberty anyway, swallowed the risk for the chance for one stolen kiss.

“Oh Geralt,” says the bard and tips up to meet him again.

It feels inevitable, a slow downhill tumble into a first kiss that in time becomes no more memorable than the thousands of others. The same soft quality of moonlight on skin echoing across many nights, the timeline blurring. Here a sigh, a touch that reverberates across the whole summer.

They sleep curled together most nights, often under the stars, inevitably waking some time in the small hours of the morning, chilled with dew, and stumbling back into the cabin to slip together on the mattress. The Witcher kisses the hollow of Jaskier's neck. Jaskier clings to the arm slung around his waist. They wake again as the sun rises, entangled.

It is those summer mornings that are remembered most clearly, long after. The rest slips together in the liquid quality of a dream.

* * *

_FALL_

The ripening of the hard stone fruit and middling apple crop in the orchard marks the turning of the season, as the nights take on a seeping chill.

The first roaring autumn bonfire out under the sky finds them clutching at one another with abandon, as though hoping to trap the feverish quality of dwindling summer nights in the warm place between their bodies.

“Geralt,” Jaskier gasps, the Witcher beneath him, silver hair splayed in tangles across the ground. He bends to kiss him and misses, catches the line of his chin instead of mouth, laughs and brings their lips together. “Is this retirement, then? Is this the after? Just this.” He gasps as their hips shift together. “Me, you, and the bloody sheep and _hngg_ , a whole lifetime of this right here and just-- _fuck!”_

They wake on the hard ground before a fire dwindled to ashes, cold and sore, and soundly agree that the season for sleeping outdoors has passed.

All across the farm, the fruits of Geralt's labor through the spring and summer swell on the vine and branch and stem. There are great, orange squash to be cooked to soup and canned, beets and turnips to be pickled and roasted fresh over the fire, potatoes to store in bushels in the cellar, stone fruits to be boiled to jam and apples to be boiled to butter.

Jaskier does not mind this work in the kitchen, the steam rising from a pot hung over the hearth. He tests a spoonful for flavor, and Geralt chases the taste with a kiss.

“Too sweet,” he says into his mouth, and Jaskier's mumbling about how one can't simply take sugar out once added and it's too expensive to waste are muffled into a deepening embrace.

The last of the milk is drawn off the ewes and pressed into soft cheese, and then, the ram is turned out with them to frolic and rut through the shortening, autumn days.

Quilt pulled tight around them through the nights, the pair need no excuse to huddle close. They luxuriate in the shared warmth there, a warm press of bare skin and heated touches.

One morning, they wake to a white frost crystallized on pasture and crop and rooftop alike, a scintillating crust that the sun rises to melt away.

Geralt grumbles over the ruin of his final harvest, plucking what he can from amidst the fields as the damaged crops curl down their leaves and blacken. Jaskier plucks at his lute and laughs at the sullen expression on the Witcher's face, and Geralt cuffs him into a chokehold as he rambles into song.

_“In skirmish and scuffle, he scarce ever tired  
but had no defense for the killing frost's ire~”_

As a fell, winter wind begins to howl off the sea day and night, the Witcher sorts the young lambs ram from ewe, rams to the dry paddock behind the barn and ewes back out to pasture with their mothers.

Jaskier watches from the fenceline as the choicest little rams are gripped fast between the Witcher's legs, their heads held still in one hand as a dagger presses into the curve of their throats, blood spilling to the hard-packed earth and dribbling into their wool. Half are skinned and laid out to cure into jerky and the rest they drive down into the village to sell at the market.

On the twisting path along the sea, the Witcher is a cloaked figure on horseback, bowed against the fierce wind, the young rams tugging up scant grasses tucked between boulders as he urges them along. The line of the horizon over the black Gulf bears a bloom of thunderheads, pale as the fresh wool of the lambs and as the Witcher's hair as the wind steals his hood away.

Jaskier, hanging back on the trail to capture the sight in his memory, has never seen anything more captivating.

It's while jostled in the crowded market, the rams bleating with displeasure as stranger's pinch at their fat and peer into their mouths, that the latest news from elsewhere on the Continent reaches their ears.

_Nilfgard marches on Cintra. Carvin' a bloody swathe up the Continent. Sure to be at her doorstep in the next fortnight._

Without the sheep milling around their legs, the path back to the farmstead feels barren and far colder.

“Come on, Geralt,” says Jaskier, as he hurries to keep up with Roach's quickened pace. “This is Cintra. It's just rumors. It won't happen. Not as easy as all that.”

Geralt says nothing the whole trek back. He draws to a sharp halt in front of the barn and swings out of the saddle, undoing the girth and pulling the mare's tack loose with sharp, tense gestures. Jaskier rushes to grab him by the arm before he can storm off elsewhere.

“If the child dies,” he growls, spinning in Jaskier's grip. “If they are slaughtered and I could have stopped it, then what good am I? What good is any of this?” He shakes Jaskier off and stalks inside the cabin. By the time Jaskier enters, he has already returned his cloak to the back of the door and loosened the belt holding the short dagger he brought to market, setting it with a thump on the worn table.

“This,” Jaskier says, struck suddenly by the feeling that the ground has fallen away from him, tongue loosened by the shift of the earth between them. “For the last time, what is _this_ , Geralt? Witchers don't go on holiday, and Witchers don't retire, so what's the plan here? How long can you ignore it? Spend another few years playing farmer and pretend there is no child pledged to you? What? We grow old together by the sea? Ha!”

“Shut up, bard,” he growls and reels on him. His voice rises to a bellow, furious. “Bad enough to be saddled with a blasted child surprise, but I have to listen to you prattling on as well.” His gold eyes flash, voice swelling to a volume that seems to rattle the thick panes of the cabin windows. “Why is it you're always right there at the center of every pile of shit I'm ever mired in? The child, the djinn, the dragon hunt. Shoveling me deeper.”

“Oh fuck off!” Jaskier exclaims. “You dig yourself into your own shit, Witcher. You don't need my assistance.”

“You're right, I take it back,” he says bitterly. “You've done fuck all to help around here the past year. Couldn't shovel shit even to save your sorry hide.”

“That's not fair, no one asked you to take up farming on a fucking whim.”

“No one asked you to follow me!” he growls, pacing the room. “Never should have come here in the first place. Foolish to think myself capable of escaping any of it. My lot is not cast here, toiling on the land like some peasant, wiling away my days. A Witcher's lot is not to—” He reels around to again face the bard and falters at the look on his face.

His jaw is tight, a pained grimace twisting the thin line of his mouth, something forlorn in the damp sheen of his eyes. He holds himself straight and tall and meets Geralt's gaze without flinching, does not move even as the fury floods out of the Witcher's body. As Geralt takes a faltering step toward him, the bard jerks his head, and he stands still again.

“If all of this is nothing but a distraction from your great Destiny,” says Jaskier finally, not quite keeping the tremble out of his voice. “Then, you may as well just fuck off and find your child. And not come back.”

“Jaskier--”

“Go,” he snarls, and in the silence that stretches after, Geralt grabs his cloak from the back of the door and begins to pull together provisions. By the time he stretches to pull down the twin swords he has stashed in the rafters and shrugs them onto his back, the bard's features have softened in the evening light streaming through the windows. He goes to Geralt, straightens the line of his cloak.

“Jaskier,” Geralt says again but does not say more. They stand together by the door for a long, heavy moment. Geralt's eyes drop to Jaskier's lips, as though he aims to kiss him.

He doesn't do so.

“Go on, Geralt,” Jaskier says with something resigned and sad in his voice. “If Cintra is really to come under siege, the child will need you.” He draws back the hand that still rests on the Witcher's chest. “I'll... mind things here.” _Until you return_ , is unspoken. _If you wish to return or are able to._ His eyes say _I would follow you if you ask, even now,_ , and Geralt does not ask.

The Witcher rides out from the farmstead through an evening muffled in banks of fog, and Jaskier watches the little figure on the red mare be swallowed up by the hills, turned towards Fate and away.

* * *

_WINTER_

The sound of hoofbeats startles him one morning as he sits stoking the fire, loathe to go out into the bitter wind and start the morning. He drops the poker to the dirt floor and hisses as coals flick across the room. In the time it takes to stamp them out with the flapping edge of the quilt he holds pulled tight across his shoulders, the horse draws over the hill and clatters to a stop nearby.

Jaskier curses and fumbles for the dagger stowed beneath the bed and peers out through the fogged window. Bandits, surely, though they'll be disappointed with their spoils here. He has a healthy stock of food to last the winter, twenty head or so of sheep, and naught else.

Outside the door, there is the unmistakable sound of someone stomping clods of snow from their boots. Very polite bandits, then. He realizes he had foolishly forgotten last night to swing shut the bar on the door only as it blasts inward in a sweep of frigid wind and lets in two ice-encrusted figures, one half the size of the other.

They rush to close the door behind them against the wind, and the little one sweeps off her hood. A girl, ruddy-cheeked and white-haired, who hurries to stoop at once before the crackling fire and warm her outstretched hands.

“Hey now, blizzard or no, you can't just come barging in like you own the place. Did your mother instill no sense of propriety into your--”

Geralt removes his wet cloak and hangs it on the back of the door.

“Hey there,” he says as Jaskier gapes at him.

“You--” he squeaks and fights the warring urges to shout at him or embrace him. Embracing wins out, and he stalks to pull Geralt down into a tight hug. “You're cold as a troll's tit, you stupid bastard,” he says. “I hope you bedded Roach down nice before bursting in here. This weather's gone sour and not likely to get better. Nevermind, I'll do it when I go sort out the sheep. Probably run her for miles through this mess. Tsk.”

“Hmm,” says Geralt, a fond smile softening his features. The sight swells a warm bubble of something in Jaskier's chest, and without thought, he finds himself reaching a hand that stills halfway to the Witcher's face. A pointed cough from near the fire distracts him, and he looks to the girl.

“She's your Child Surprise,” he says. “Looks just like you.”

“Ciri, this is Jaskier,” says Geralt. “Don't mind the babbling.” Jaskier swats at his shoulder.

“Shut it!” he says. “I've been cooped up here alone for months with no one to speak to but myself and some very unappreciative livestock.”

“It's been two weeks, Jaskier.”

“At least three,” he says. “And long, cold ones.”

His gaze holds on the Witcher, lingering on the memory of his charged departure. It shouldn't be so easy to fall back into easy banter now, not when he cursed his name and yelled into the wind on the cliffside for days after. But it is easy, as it's ever been.

“So,” he says and fights to keep the quiver from his voice. “What's the verdict, then? Am I to resume my most valiant shit-shoveling duties?”

A deep laugh rumbles low through the Witcher's chest, and he steps close, reaching to echo the bard's earlier movement and touch his face with an outstretched hand.

“You are not my Destiny, Jaskier,” says Geralt, a rough hand palming his jaw. Jaskier swallows hard. _Of course not._ Not him. Yennefer, entangled by a wish. Ciri, bound by a promise. But him? Just some sad, small thing fumbling ever after the great Witcher, trying to keep up.

Geralt growls, shakes him by the jaw. He presses a kiss not to his lips but to the sweep of tousled hair across his forehead.

“You little idiot,” he grunts. “I mean to say, you are what I choose. I choose this willingly. You. This life.”

“You... choose?” Jaskier breathes, weightless.

“Choice,” Geralt says. “I still have that. For as long as you have left, I choose here.”

“As long as I...” Jaskier feels dazed. _A lifetime._ “Here?”

“Here,” the Witcher says. “I promise.”

It is a promise that he keeps.

* * *

_50 YEARS AND MORE AFTER_

By the time the lady bard begins her last, lilting song of the night, the tavern is nearly-empty and hazy with pipe smoke, most folks waddled off to bed or close to dozing in their tankards.

She allows her voice to swell and rise with the maudlin tune, ever a favorite of hers and one she indulges in only when she knows the sweet sadness of the melody isn't likely to upset the more sensitive sorts who would balk and gripe and withhold their coin.

The notes soar into the eaves, drawn deep from her belly for one last flaunt of the evening, though she knows few are listening now and few will pay her mind as she quiets and heads on to bed. Some performances hover in that space between self-indulgence and showing off with hardly a soul paying mind, and that's just the lot of a bard.

She draws the song to a hushed close, the last lines tinged with a crushing bittersweetness that she milks with somber gusto, and that's that, onto bed she goes.

Except as she turns to leave, she is startled to find her arm caught in an iron grip.

“Hey, leave off!” she exclaims and tries to jerk away, but the stranger holds fast. He is cloaked and unfamiliar, but she remembers him entering earlier that evening with a dark-haired woman swathed in furs, disappearing together to huddle in a far corner.

The bard scans the smoky room, but no one else seems to notice her capture. No innkeeper to speak of and all her comrades gone long to bed.

“That song,” growls the voice of the stranger from beneath his low-drawn hood. “Where did it come from?”

“Oh, it's one of my favorites,” says the lady bard with a tight smile. Perhaps he is simply an overenthusiastic admirer of the arts rather than an assassin. Not so well-versed in social graces and the like but an admirer none-the-less. “A classic by the late Master Pankratz. Gave all his earthly compositions and poetry to the college at Oxenfurt upon his death, he did. I studied there myself and--”

“I don't know it,” grunts the stranger.

“You've heard others sing it different most like,” she says. “Is like all old songs, many folks go about takin' liberties with the tale. But aye, I think mine's closest to what the Master intended.”

“How so?”

“Well, some say it's nonsense, you know? That weren't no Witcher alive what's likely to give any mind to nothin' but killing. Not one would swan off with some tart to live on the coast all those years,” she says. “Folks say the Master lived his whole life alone out there, comin' up with grand stories. Makes a decent song but poor truth.”

The stranger holds very still and says nothing for long moments that stretch uncomfortably. The bard thinks of the sweet wine she has waiting for her in her quarters and aches to be away from the too-warm room with the intensity of the stranger's gaze fixed on her.

“Supposin' I'm something of a romantic in keepin' true to the original,” she says. “It's a sad tale enough without—”

The stranger's gloved hand tightens on her forearm. She flinches back as he goes for his belt, awaiting the sting of a dagger twisted in her gut, but instead he draws out a bulging coin purse and presses the lot into her hand.

“Will this suffice?” he asks, voice rumbling low through the charged air. Beneath his hood, gold eyes gleam. “For the composure of another verse?”

“You flatter me, good gentleman, but to the Master's superior composition? I couldn't possibly--” A flicker of light from the hearth illuminates his face then, and the bard knows him at once. She curls her fingers around the offered coin. “Of course, sir. Of course. I'd do so gladly.”

* * *

_The Bard to the Witcher_  
_with youthful bravado_  
_said “In my voice, your songs_  
_will flourish and grow.”_

_“I will go where you go_  
_and jump quick to follow_  
_through valley and mountain_  
_from sea to dark sea.”_

_The Bard to the Witcher_  
_on dragon-swept summit_  
_said “Through this great, one life,_  
_do what pleases you.”_

_“I will tread where you tread_  
_and endlessly follow_  
_to long-raging battle_  
_or down to the sea.”_

_The Bard to the Witcher_  
_as they reached the coastline_  
_said “Rest here a while now_  
_as long as you need.”_

_“And if you should ask me,_  
_no longer to follow_  
_then I shall yet stay here_  
_and wait by the sea.”_

_The Bard to his Witcher_  
_in red, fading sunlight_  
_said “As I grow old here,_  
_to you I'll be true.”_

_“But someday I will go,_  
_where you cannot follow_  
_I ask only this, love:_  
_remember the sea.”_

_And so said the Witcher_  
_in seasons long after,_  
_“the best song of my life_  
_still rests by the sea.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [let me follow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv0M-5RUFQM) by son lux was listened to most liberally while writing this, though at some point that was eclipsed by the damn ending ballad that got stuck in my head
> 
> also please for imagery of shepherd!geralt please imagine him in [ this painting](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/peter-coulthard-mountain-landscape-painting-with-sheep-dog-and-shepherd-in-lake-district-england) but with roach except for a dog. oddly, I did not find that painting until after writing that scene but I saw almost that very same image in my brain

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr [@limerental](https://limerental.tumblr.com/)


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